My hands clenched into fists at my sides. “Feeling the way I do right now? I just might.”
“Then who would help you with your little problem, Jill? I’m not aware of another person alive in the world who has as much knowledge as I do when it comes to parachemistry.”
“I guess I’d just have to deal. Because if you had killed Declan claiming it was for research when it’s clear to me that it was vengeance, pure and simple”—I swallowed hard—“I would have taken his stake and plunged it into your throat.”
His brows went up. “Violent. You struck me as a nice girl, Jill.”
I glared at him. “Maybe I was once upon a time. Things have changed.”
The phone on the wall started to ring. Keeping a wary eye on me, the doctor went to it and picked it up.
“Reynolds here. Yes . . . just a moment.” He held the phone out to Lawrence. “He says it’s important.”
Eyeing me as he gave me a wide berth, Lawrence went to the phone.
Dr. Reynolds had used a horse-load of tranquilizer on Declan. He was strong—easily the strongest man I’d ever known in my life—but he was completely out of it right now.
I touched his face, stroking his eye patch back into place, since it had shifted a little. I traced down his deepest scar, the one that started on his forehead and ran down past his patch to his jawline. I leaned closer and brushed my lips against it.
Declan protected me ninety-nine percent of the time. I would protect him for the remaining one percent. And if Dr. Reynolds or his loyal vampire assistant wanted to get to him again, they’d have to go through me first. An empty threat normally, but at the moment I felt ready to tear someone’s finger off with my teeth if they so much as pointed it in my direction.
I stroked his forehead. “Declan, please wake up.”
His eyelid fluttered but didn’t open.
“You’re alive,” I told him, just in case he needed the reminder. “My blood didn’t kill you. I’m sure it hurt like hell, though, and I’m sorry for that. As soon as you wake up, we’re getting the f**k out of here.”
“Jill, it’s time we got started,” Dr. Reynolds said.
I glared at him. “With what? Fixing me?”
“No. I need more time to work on a viable serum. You said we could take more samples of your blood to keep in reserve.”
“So we’re here not because you were ready to start helping me, but because you wanted me to help you. After you tried to kill Declan. That makes a ton of sense, you bastard.”
His jaw tightened. “Perhaps my personal feelings got in the way of what I should be focusing on.”
“Wow, you’re f**king brilliant. No wonder you’re a scientist.” My eyes narrowed. “Can’t really say I’m in much of a mood at the moment to be all that cooperative. All I want to know is if Declan’s going to be okay.”
“If he’s survived this long after being injected with your blood, I don’t see why not.” He looked openly disappointed about that.
“You don’t honestly believe Declan set out to kill your wife just for the hell of it, do you? She must have—”
“Must have what? Deserved it?” he snapped, but then his expression softened again. “I—I don’t know anymore. In a war, sometimes it’s hard to tell which side is right. I myself have had to do many things outsiders might consider evil. But in order to learn, to grow, I had to find a way to—”
His voice broke off with a grunt of pain and he spun around. It took me a second to register with shock that there was now a knife sticking out of his back. He grappled to pull it from his flesh, and it clattered to the ground.
Lawrence stood behind him, his hands fisted at his sides. The look on his face left no question as to what he was feeling.
Rage.
My eyes widened with horror. “What the hell are you doing?”
Lawrence didn’t take his attention off Dr. Reynolds. “I trusted you, you son of a bitch.”
His eyes had turned to black—normally what a hungry vampire’s did. Dark blue veins branched down along the sides of his face to his neck. That was another very bad sign.
The fact that Dr. Reynolds was still on his feet made me think that the knife hadn’t been deep enough to kill him. Blood stained his white coat.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“That phone call? That was somebody I had searching for Susan. They finally figured out where she is.”
“You need to calm down, Lawrence. We need to talk about this.”
“All of this time I’ve trusted you, Victor. You gave me a chance when everyone else wanted to have me staked. You saw that I still could be a help to you, despite what I am. I thought you and my wife—you were the only ones who gave me a chance.” He let out a shaky breath. “And this is what you do to me? To us?”
I was listening, but I didn’t understand. Something had broken in Lawrence; his voice had a pitchy quality that made me think he wasn’t in complete control of his sanity at the moment. Whatever he’d heard on the phone had broken him.
“Lawrence—” Dr. Reynolds began, his voice filled with pain.
“She’s been here all the time, hasn’t she? In the rooms that are off limits to everyone but you. You son of a bitch. You stole her from me and have been using her in your goddamned experiments, haven’t you? Haven’t you?”
He came forward enough to grab the doctor by his coat and shook him hard enough to rattle anyone’s brain.
I crouched next to Declan, holding on to his arm tightly. “Declan, wake up. You have to snap out of this now.”
That feeling of dread I’d had in my gut ever since we arrived at this place—maybe I should have paid attention to it. But I never could have predicted this.
“I knew what you’d do if I told you the truth,” Dr. Reynolds said, his voice strong but now with a naked edge of fear to it. “Lawrence, listen to me, you didn’t know this, but—but Susan was pregnant. She was keeping it a secret from you.”
The rage on Lawrence’s face faded, replaced with shock. “Pregnant?”
“It was your child. A dhampyr was growing inside her.”
“Jesus.”
“She didn’t want you to know—she knew you’d take it badly. She came to me to get an abortion.”